That’s where I thought I’d find you,
on the bench we used to visit.

I laid out your favorite flowers
and that blanket you liked.
I stayed a while,
whispering everything I wanted to say to the
water, the sand and the gulls.

Thinking maybe that you’d join me
as a hand on my shoulder that you’d worry I couldn’t
feel, but I would.

I know it’s just myself that I was talking to.
That the way the wind laughed in perfect
timing with my jokes was just the wind doing
the only thing it knows.

That when the willow sighed its leaves into my
lap, and the tears began to fall, it was not your hands
that had moved them—they bowed only to the breath
of the ocean.

And I know that dying is the most natural
thing that any of us can do
but I never pictured myself, sitting here,
looking out at this horizon without you.

I hope you find someone that warms you more than whiskey,
that doesn’t burn on the way down.
I hope every sip of them brings memories that don’t blur, or falter,
or leave you numb at 1 am, sunken beneath the blue glow of a screen.
And whether that someone is a lover or a friend doesn’t matter much,
but I hope you find them.
I hope you tell them how scared you are of the thing that’s waiting
for you in the dark corners of the rooms you walk through,
because they’ll be scared too, of something.
And if you’re lucky, maybe the thing that scares you scares them too,
and together you’ll have a kind of power that drags it out,
kicking, burning, screaming,
into the light.

Your parting words may as well have been
that you hate yourself
more than you could ever love me

I can feel myself spiraling somewhere dark,
the light in my head that has always salvaged me
switched off and kicked somewhere,
indeterminate.
And I’m afraid that no amount of fumbling will find it in my hands again.

You leave your past behind to erode in your head;
crumbling temples tangled in the jungles of your mind where you do not wander.
The secrets of yourself still dormant within them—gold and glittering in the dust.
Sealed up beneath the settled dirt of the memories you choose not to visit,
and you call it moving on.

You said my taste in people was strange,
and I didn’t know how to tell you that what
I’m attracted to isn’t a type of person,
but the color blue.